How to process images to emulate mismatched color profiles?

Question

I have been trying to emulate a saturation effect that occurs when I do the following in Photoshop:

1. Select the Export As dialog and choosing JPEG without integrating an ICC profile
2. Select the Open File dialog and choose to assign the Wide Gamut RGB profile

The saturation can also be seen in preview by just selecting the Export As dialog without choosing the integrate ICC profile option.

Note that I am using a wide-gamut Adobe RGB monitor.

Now to my question:

How can I achieve the same kind of saturation without doing these steps. Specifically I am looking to design or find a LUT that applies the same kind of saturation on a Photoshop layer.

Any hints as to how to do this?

Thanks!

Answer 1

The simple way to get the same effect is to simply assign, from the edit menu, the ProPhoto RGB profile to the image. This is the same as exporting and saving the file w/o a profile then attaching ProPhoto RGB to it when opening. One further advantage is that saving as a jpeg invokes lossy compression and simply assigning ProPhoto doesn't lose info. It just causes it to be re-interpreted. It will change the tone curve to a gamma of 1.8 so you will see a general lightening as well as the substantially increased saturation.

You can then convert the image to any other colorspace if desired. For instance you might want to have the image in Adobe RGB which is a good match for most wide gamut monitors. Or just convert back to your original working space. This will retain the changes seen in assigning the ProPhoto profile but will remap the RGB values to the smaller colorspace. You can then place this image in another second layer. I don't think custom luts in a filter layer would provide as accurate a result.